Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Nine
Philip La Paiva cared, if nobody else seemed to. A day ago, his most pressing desire in the world had been to make his own way through it, free from any affiliation to his father. And now that his wish had come true, all his bearings had been lost, and, without his father somewhere in the background with which to define himself by contrast, he had no idea who he was.
“All I wanted was love from him,” he realised aloud, bent awkwardly at the waist, clasping the edge of his writing-desk, “and all he wanted was love from me!”
He wept, standing like that, as Adam must have, filliped from on high. Modeste, loitering against the wall, didn’t know what to make of this explicit display of emotion. Philip had always been so straightforward in his scatological compulsion. Why bring concepts like love and filial devotion into it? What the fuck was the matter with him?
Overcome with remorse, Philip broke down, collapsing to the floor, still clinging to the tabletop for some reason Modeste couldn’t fathom. Hoping her excrement might salve him, she approached him for a caress, but he shoved her away. Without anything else to do—this was in the days before TV or the Internet, remember—she moped off into his wardrobe, sat down amidst the coats, took a shit, and in so doing, achieved orgasm and exposed her backstory to any who happened to be in her vicinity:
From a very young age, she’d learnt to shit on the floor, and in various other inappropriate places, in order to attract attention from her large, poor family who lived in one room. She couldn’t compete with her frankly savage siblings through volume of noise, fisticuffs or traditional notions of virtue, but she overcame her handicap through her power to summon up and expel a seemingly bottomless (as it were) supply of faeces at will. (One of her brothers, in fact, happened to be named “Will”, and, at times, when he was being annoying, she did expel her excrement at Will.) Her parents, for some reason, failed to understand or appreciate her gift, choosing instead to dispatch her to an uncle in the countryside, where, it was felt, there would be more room, and more tolerance, for such an outpouring of foul-smelling bowel product. Coming face-to-face/-snout/-beak with animals for the first time, Modeste was fascinated by their capacity for waste; foolishly, she tried to compete with the livestock in the quantity and frequency of dung production, but was defeated handily. After years of mockery from the farm animals, who openly squawked at her failure, she finally, now a young woman, retreated to the city in shame. A series of cleaning jobs ensued, invariably ending in indignant dismissal, before she wandered to the hotel, where her peculiarity met with an overarching tolerance by Herr Voot’s predecessor, and when Voot assumed the directorship, he could not bear to think of getting rid of the stupid old cow, meaning that, barring a tussle here and there with the excessively sanitary Mifkin, her position was assured for the rest of her days. Until she met Philip.
“I’m sorry,” that young man now warbled into his bicep. “I love you. I won’t push you away as I did my father. Everything I said before, I mean now, a hundredfold. Let us flee this place, and all we’ve ever known. Let us found a new continent of the heart, free from history, free from our past. In the manure of yesteryear, let us plant our future.”
Tears bubbled in her eyes. “All my victories, sir, I dedicate to you. I give you all I have. My shit, is your shit, as they say. I will make you happy, sir. If God should grant me that power, I swear, I’ll make you happy.”